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The Knowledge Economy
The Imperative for “Mass” Higher Education
When discussing the growing demand for postsecondary education I’ve
frequently heard, “Everybody doesn’t need to go to college.” Charles Murray,
in his 2008 book Real Education, 4 elaborated this caution at length, but with
a fundamentally tautological argument. Murray maintains that a college education
is “real” only when it results in the knowledge and skill traditionally
achieved by the most intellectually gifted people who also have enjoyed extraordinary
opportunities to develop their talents. If “real education” is defined
in elitist terms, quite naturally only a few people will attain it.
One doesn’t have to believe everybody can become Shakespeare or Einstein
to realize that Murray’s definition of “real education” is far too narrow for
the twenty-first century. All people must have more knowledge and skill in a
knowledge economy. Moreover, while wisdom and education are far from perfectly
correlated, wisdom requires knowledge. Better-educated citizens are essential
for the world to cope with the political and environmental issues of our
era. Nothing in history or current experience suggests we have exhausted the
capacity of human beings to learn or their need to benefit from more learning.
H. G. Wells’s 1919 summation “Human history becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe” 5 is even more pertinent today.
The facts in the labor market also contradict Murray. Many who deny the
growing need for postsecondary education seem to be recalling the workforce
of the 1960s and 1970s. Even though many countries have erased the advantages
previously enjoyed by the United States workforce, the educational attainment
of U.S. workers has grown dramatically. In 1973 it had a labor force
of 91 million. High school dropouts held 32 percent of those jobs, and high
school graduates held 40 percent. Workers with no college education accounted
for 65.5 million jobs in the 91-million workforce. The other 25.5 million
jobs (28 percent of the total) were held by college graduates (16 percent) and
people with some college (12 percent). See Figure 1.
In 2009, the United States had a labor force of 155 million employees.
Only 14 percent of those jobs were held by high school dropouts, and 31 percent
were held by high school graduates. Their share of the workforce dropped
from 72 percent to 45 percent in 36 years. Workers with no college held 69.8
million jobs in 2009.
By comparison, the number of jobs held by people with college degrees or
some college jumped from 25.5 million in 1973 to 85.3 million in 2009. Postsecondary
trained workers now account for 55 percent of employees. Nearly all
the job growth in the past thirty-six years has been in jobs filled by people with
some postsecondary education. 6 Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues project
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